He had the plutonium and he thought he knew who Maxudov was, but he felt profoundly dirtied.
One of the big helicopters brought Repin and Pope-Ginna out from Cape Town two days later. Gance had gone with the chopper’s inward flight, taking with him two of the phials from the habitat and the name of a biologist who would analyze the contents.
When the big chopper was visible against the dense gray sky on its return flight, Tarp went above-decks and waited near the improvised landing pad. It was warmer on the deck now, but there was a drizzle that the ship’s motion whipped into a stinging spray. Not cheerful weather.
He had readied a space for Pope-Ginna’s arrival — a forward anchor locker that he had had emptied of all its gear. It was trapezoidal, uniformly gray, noisy with the vibration of the engines. Entered from above, it was eleven feet from deck to overhead, its only light the portable lamps that had been rigged from winch lines up above. When a man stood on the floor of that space, he knew he was a prisoner, an outcast in a steel shell.
Repin came out of the chopper like an athlete bursting from the stadium tunnel. He was wearing a new alpaca overcoat and a black hat that was so stylish he looked operatic. On his hands were gloves of leather as thin and flexible as rubber.
“So!” Repin was smiling gleefully. “So!” He looked questioningly at Tarp. “So, my friend?”
“I got the plutonium.”
Repin clapped him on both arms. “Ha-ha!” He looked up into Tarp’s grim face. “But that should please you, Tarp!”
“It does.”
“No, it does not.”
Tarp shook his head, pulled away from Repin’s grasp. “Where is he?” They were shouting over the sound of the dying helicopter rotors.
“He is very slow old man. Almost as old as me.” Repin laughed again.
Tarp led Repin away from the helicopter pad toward the superstructure. “Is he on the chopper?”
“Of course, of course!” Repin turned a triumphant face toward the aircraft, whose rotors were almost still. “He comes out now, you see? He is very sick old man.”
Two crewmen were struggling to bring their burden out of the helicopter. It looked like a body bag to Tarp.
“Sedated?”
“I hired a doctor in Mexico City.” He clasped his hands in front of him. “A healthy climate, Mexico City. Very enjoyable. Cuban cigars, good drink, very pretty girls…” He sniffed as if he were smelling that air and not the mist of the South Atlantic.
“How long before he’ll come around?”
“I have an ampoule of something if we want to wake him up. Otherwise, several hours.”
Tarp frowned. “I want him healthy,” he growled.
Repin looked coldly at him. “Do you, now,” he said in a chilly British voice.
“I want him so he can talk.”
“He will talk.”
“Has he talked already?”
“I know better than to do that. I am not an amateur.”
Pope-Ginna was in a sleeping bag, his face a pink circle in the hood at the top. As he was carried by them, his eyes blinked slowly, unseeingly.
“Compartment A-twenty-seven!” Tarp shouted at the seamen as they came close. They nodded. They already knew.
Tarp took Repin’s arm and led him along the narrow and slippery gangway that flanked the huge deck. The metal surface was crisscrossed with cast-in steel ribs, but there was still danger of sliding on the wet surface. Repin grabbed the rail and looked around at Tarp. “I do not like the water much!” he shouted. The ship rose and his weight shifted suddenly; Tarp put out a hand and started him toward a ladder.
He had requisitioned a vacant suite behind the captain’s, one kept for executives and guests of the oil company that owned the tanker. It was luxurious, and Repin, stepping into it, seemed to forget the discomfort of the deck.
“For me?” He beamed.
“And Pope-Ginna, when he’s done talking.”
There were two rooms, a private bath, a serving galley. It was like a very, very good hotel. “I should have brought Therese,” Repin said, looking into the galley. He glanced at Tarp. “No, I did not take her to Mexico.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“I know how suspicious you are.” Repin laid his beautiful hat on a polished table and tossed his beautiful gloves into it. “Now Repin pretends he is very important man, appropriate to this suite, yes? Yes. Repin will be manager of oil cartel. So, to business!” He slapped his hands together. “So, you got the plutonium. You are very remarkable. Very remarkable. Where is it now?”
“On board.”
“Is radioactive?”
“Barely.”
“So.” Repin nodded several times. “So.” He looked out a port that had been made square like the window of a building. There was nothing to be seen but gray sea, and yet he looked and looked. “So now I can go back to Moscow.”
“We don’t have Maxudov yet.”
“You think you will Find him?”
“I hope so. He isn’t Beranyi, I’m sure of that.”
He told Repin about the habitat and about Beranyi. He showed him the photographs of the Russian. He did not mention the phials or the computer discs or the fetuses.
“What is it for, this habitat?”
“Dead storage.”
Tarp was still wearing the weather jacket he had worn on the deck. He unzipped it now and took it off; as he did, Repin unbuttoned the overcoat and stood with it swept back behind his arms. “Why?”
“To hide things.”
“What things? Plutonium? Bodies?”
“Yes. Those things. Some other things, too.”
“What?”
Tarp shook his head. “Part of it’s a laboratory. It looks as if it’s used for one stage of a process. The final stage, that would make sense. Everything’s brought in; I don’t think that much actual work is done in the habitat. I think that it’s meant as a safe repository — surrounded by a very hostile environment. There were some experimental specimens there, in locked boxes that were kept at a constant thirty-one degrees Celsius. Outside the habitat it was six degrees; ten miles away it was one degree. It’s a good place to put something that’s unstable and potentially dangerous.”
Repin narrowed his eyes.
“What kind of something?”
There was coffee in a shiny vacuum bottle. Tarp poured himself some and handed the bottle to Repin. “Something alive.”
He looked at Repin over the rim of the cup. Repin poured, replaced the bottle’s top with great care. “You are being mysterious.”
“Not intentionally. I brought back a sample of something. I’m having it analyzed. You remember the message in your man’s pocket in Havana — about Schneider and about a doctor who ran an abortion clinic?” Tarp sipped the coffee and set the cup down. “Whatever is there in the habitat, I think it uses research on fetuses. Gustav Fahner had used fetuses in research in Germany.” He touched the saucer, tapped the side of the cup with a fingernail. “I don’t like it.”
“You’re sure it’s Beranyi?”
“It’s Beranyi all right.”
“But he isn’t Maxudov.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But do you know so? How does being dead prove anything? He could be Maxudov and be dead — ah?”
“We’ll find out from Pope-Ginna. Maybe.” Tarp poured more coffee. “This is a dirty business.”
“That is not news.”
“No, no, not what we’re doing. What went on in that sea lab. A filthy business. There were little boxes in the wall — a sickly green light inside them, and test tubes of stuff that looked like…” He shook his head. “Like something you’d find in a boil. And the fetuses. I know in my bones what it means: it’s Fahner’s work, being done in a new way and a new place. It’s that Nazi shit come back to make us filthy again.”